Now you can pair two Mini Jamboxes together for bigger sound

Jawbone just made it easier for Mini Jambox owners to jam with friends.

With the first big software update for the Mini Jambox, which launches today, you can now easily link up two of the tiny speakers for louder music. Additionally, you and a friend can take turns sending tunes to the paired Mini Jamboxes.

Updates like this aren’t unusual for Jawbone: The company previously released a software update for the Big Jambox, which improved its sound quality and added two hours of battery life. Rather than pushing consumers to buy new devices every year, Jawbone has focused on improving the product experience for its existing customers with software updates.

Of course, the new pairing feature could encourage people to buy multiple Mini Jambox. But Travis Bogard, Jawbone’s vice president of product management and strategy, tells me the feature is more directed at serendipitous moments when friends end up somewhere with their own Mini Jamboxes.

For its size, the Mini Jambox already delivered decent sound quality. But when I tested two units paired together, I noticed that music sounded richer and more lively. The pairing feature works best with loud and poppy music — there wasn’t much of an improvement for quiet classical.

Setting up the pairing feature is also surprisingly easy: You just need to hold down the three buttons on the top of the Mini Jambox to put it in pairing mode, then do the same for a nearby unit. The two devices instantly link up over Bluetooth. Control over the pair is shared between you and the owner of the other Mini Jambox.

Even though competing wireless speakers (like Logitech’s UE Boom) have offered similar pairing features for a while now, Bogard tells me Jawbone worked hard to make the pairing process simpler and more reliable. The company had to rewrite its Bluetooth communications software to optimize it for running two Mini Jamboxes at the same time.

Today’s software update also brings Jawbone’s “Live Audio” technology to the Mini Jambox, which uses algorithms to recreate stereo sound from a single speaker. Jawbone is also lowering the price of the Mini Jambox to $130 (down from $180) for a limited time.